Pretty nice man. Your hips raise a little fast on some reps otherwise slick work.
Nice work. I agree that your hips raise a bit fast. Try keeping more tension in you hips and keeping the knees open a bit longer during the initial drive up. This is most noticeable in the last rep where your knees and hips shoot back and ultimately creates more stress in your lower back. It’s understandable that it’s your failure rep but there is some room for improvement. Keep up the good work.
Looks pretty good, take a little more time in your setup to push your hips into the bar horizontally instead of just putting them low.
[quote]lift206 wrote:
Nice work. I agree that your hips raise a bit fast. Try keeping more tension in you hips and keeping the knees open a bit longer during the initial drive up. This is most noticeable in the last rep where your knees and hips shoot back and ultimately creates more stress in your lower back. It’s understandable that it’s your failure rep but there is some room for improvement. Keep up the good work.[/quote]
What can I do to prevent my hips from shooting up? By keeping tension, do I just sort of like flex my hips all the way through?
[quote]andy7411 wrote:
[quote]lift206 wrote:
Nice work. I agree that your hips raise a bit fast. Try keeping more tension in you hips and keeping the knees open a bit longer during the initial drive up. This is most noticeable in the last rep where your knees and hips shoot back and ultimately creates more stress in your lower back. It’s understandable that it’s your failure rep but there is some room for improvement. Keep up the good work.[/quote]
What can I do to prevent my hips from shooting up? By keeping tension, do I just sort of like flex my hips all the way through?[/quote]
Couple of things. Like I said on the other thread, that’s very good strength for age/weight. IMO you could tweak your technique a little to get more out of sumo as follows.
1 - this’ll sound odd, but be slower off the floor. I’ve found sumo works better if you focus on levering the bar up rather than pulling as you would for conventional deadlift. Once the bar is moving (around mid-shin or a bit higher), THEN accelerate and slam your knees shut.
2 - pull your shoulders further back behind the bar when you set up, and do everything you can to keep them there as you raise your hips to break the bar off the floor. This will most probably stop your hips shooting up so fast and force your to use your glutes/hams hips to move the bar which will in turn help with levering the bar up gradually.
I know it sounds odd for a deadlift to advise being slow off the floor but with sumo my understanding and experience is that it is so much harder to get back into position if you come out of it early on that the focus must be on locking into the right position and staying there. Basically, if your shoulders come forward in the early stages of the pull your leverages go to hell and you essentially end up with a conventional DL with a horribly wide stance which puts your leverages out of whack. If you lock your shoulders back behind the bar as you start the lift with your hips/glutes/hams, you keep a good arch in your back and stay in the best position. It’ll make you a bit slower off the floor but the whole lift easier.
If its any help, to set up for sumo I imagine a right angle triangle: the base is my thighs, parallel to the ground. There is a line perpecndicular to my thighs going straight up through the bar, behind which I pull my shoulders. My back makes the third side. To start the pull, all I do is open the angle between the base and my back by raising my hips and pushing through the sides of my feet to pull the floor apart, keeping my shoulders behind the line.
[quote]andy7411 wrote:
[quote]lift206 wrote:
Nice work. I agree that your hips raise a bit fast. Try keeping more tension in you hips and keeping the knees open a bit longer during the initial drive up. This is most noticeable in the last rep where your knees and hips shoot back and ultimately creates more stress in your lower back. It’s understandable that it’s your failure rep but there is some room for improvement. Keep up the good work.[/quote]
What can I do to prevent my hips from shooting up? By keeping tension, do I just sort of like flex my hips all the way through?[/quote]
Yeah, you want tension in all of the core muscles at the same time - abs, erectors, glutes and hip flexors. Placing too much emphasis on each muscle will create a tendency to put your lumbar spine in either flexion or extension but engaging them all together will balance it out. Engaging them all and contracting them as hard as possible will help keep your hip angle and back angle fixed to one another.
You should feel tension in your groin area when firing the hip flexors and you should feel your knees opening up when firing your glutes (firing them together holds the knee in place). You do want to maintain tension throughout because it means your muscles are engaged. While you ascend, you maintain tension in your glutes (and everything else) by thrusting it forward to meet the bar like what cparker said.
Focus on keeping that core area tight instead of shooting up as fast as possible. It shouldn’t take long to click since those muscles are already pretty strong. Your mid/upper back looks strong and you’re able to keep your chest up so I would just focus on the hips for now. MarkKO made some good points about taking the time to setup. Just focus on how you execute the movement by creating tension and thrusting the hips forward. Don’t let the weight pull you out of position. Worry about muscle recruitment and movement pattern, not the weight on the bar.